Our Open Thread this weekend is hosted by these two gorgeous otters, snapped at the Exmoor Zoo by Mark Ferbert.
Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
Categories: Life
Soggy here, innit? 
In memoriam: Diana Rigg 
Getting out the ‘yes’ 
100 books by women in 2016 
Hoyden About Town 
So, the Cert II course is finally over (thank heavens) and I’ve spent most of the past week suffering from the flu that’s going around. I’m just starting to recover today – I managed to sleep most of the night last night (only woke up to cough up a lung about twice) but I think it’s going to be at least a week until I’m back to what passes for normal. In the meantime, I’ve completed all the work I needed to do for the qualification, and it’s all being shipped over to the RTO in Gosford NSW, where they will check over everything, and then send the relevant parts on to the WA Department of Training, who will (in the fullness of time, and at the appropriate juncture) issue me with an actual printed certificate of qualification.
So, my plans for the next week are: 1) visit the employment service provider on Monday (pre-existing appointment); 2) catch up on four weeks housework, because my partner may mean well, but that doesn’t get the floors swept or the dishes done or the fridge stocked; 3) finish recovering from flu.
So on the positive side, India’s new prime minister spoke out against rape on Independence Day: http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/08/15/3471675/modi-rape-culture-speech/
On the negative side, the Indian Congress Party thinks the wellbeing of half the population is getting bogged down in pedestrian issues, rather than showing grand vision.
Looking forward to a future where I am not a snot monster coughing my lungs up, but it does not seem imminent.
Aqua: so you’ve had the same flu I have, then. Bastard, innit?
Enjoying the latest Musketeers adaptation, although for any purists the “based on the characters of Alexander Dumas” line tells you pretty much everything you need to know. Still, Peter Capaldi as Cardinal Richelieu and many easy-on-the-eye men in long floppy boots, boots and more boots – what’s not to like?
Re snot-monster status: have finally reached minimal snot production level, although it’s still lurking on the periphery. This latest bout affected my eyes more than usual, thus the light posting schedule.
Have spent some hours this evening discovering that stud earrings embedded in children’s ears and needing extraction are not as uncommon as a parent may wish. Earring was duly extracted and child put to bed. On the plus side I got some reading done.
Enjoying the latest Musketeers adaptation
Deborah Pless has a couple of good articles on this show.
Thanks for those links, SunlessNick – looking forward to seeing more episodes. I had already noticed that this D’Artagnan was properly Gascon-swarthy, which makes for a very welcome and long-overdue change from how D’Artagnan is usually cast, but I’ve only seen the first episode so haven’t seen the rest of the social milieu questions come up yet. I like Pless’ description of this Richelieu as always conniving but not always wrong, because that strikes me as an accurate summary of a man who worked very hard to preserve the French monarchy and aristocracy against its own excesses and the resentment against them in a burgeoning Enlightenment society – of course he was concerned with his own preeminence, but he was also concerned with ensuring that France did not go the way of England’s only recently resolved Civil War (he only managed to shore it up for a few more generations because his successors as prime minister, Mazarin and Colbert, did not have such an understanding of the need to balance different social sectors in order to prevent the Ship of State from capsizing).
Ooh ooh ooh – 2014 Hugo winners! Yesssssss.
Tigtog: OH YES. Women have destroyed science fiction! Done and dusted.
It was also nice to see No Award make a showing in the preferences.
If anyone hasn’t read Kameron Hurley’s “We Have Always Fought”, please find time, if you can. I loved Hurley’s acceptance speeches, too.
@scalzi has summarised some of the consequent wailing and gnashing of teeth at Whatever.
I guess this proves why there’s been so much wailing and gnashing of teeth – the world they want no longer exists (if it ever did, but I think formal acknowledgement of the contribution of women and other not-white-cis-het-men to SFF is important.)
Things to read! Good.
I would like to formally announce that I am for Scottish Independence and absolutely not going to join Team Australia while Tony Abbott is head cheerleader. Will I receive a badge to wear informing people I am an Enemy of Freedom, or will I have to make it myself?
(Now is clearly the time for a design competition. Bold red text on black? Green curlicues on ivory? Gold italics on sky-blue?)
How mant books can you credibly claim to be reading at once on Goodreads? I am up to four.
Eilish I hope the Scottish know to ignore him. He will have fluttered off onto something else within minutes of making that statement.
I love a good book week parade, but someone needs to give those kids some parameters. Captain Jack Sparrow is not a book character, and neither is ‘Ariel’ (unless you mean the one from the Tempest, and he is not a mermaid).
I think we have a spin off Disney Ariel book around here somewhere. So Ariel’s dodgy but technically okay. Jack Sparrow I can’t help you with 🙂
The Scottish barely know who he is; let alone care. He’s not the first state leader to intervene in this debate. Both Obama and HClinton have spoken out and said ‘No’, as have a large number of European leaders. We’ve yet to have someone announce for yes. However, if we don’t give a fuck about Obama’s opinion (which we don’t), Abbott’s isn’t even a blip on the radar.
That makes me so happy Feminist Avatar. I wish he wasn’t even a blip on our radar too.
Has anyone here read The Bunker Diary? I’m writing something that should nod towards the discussion surrounding it being awarded the Carnegie Medal.
Also, I hope everybody’s hideous diseases are on the way out.
I am afraid to tell you that Captain Jack Sparrow is indeed a character in more than one book: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/?series_id=366171
Just catching up with my recording of the 1st episode of the new season of Silk. How much do I love Maxine Peake, and can Rupert Penry-Jones please be the next 007?
P.S. the masculine tailoring on Silk should get its own BAFTA.
I’m getting better, although very very slowly – I can actually breathe through my nose at times, for the first time in over a week, but I still have the cough of dismay (“oh, no, I need to cough, I wonder which bits will hurt the most this time”), headache, sore muscles, etc.
Surfing past a shopping channel on TV, I discover that some women’s clothes now come in the following sizes: small, medium, voluptuous, very voluptous. It’s sort of like they’ve heard of Health At Every Size, but don’t actually understand it.
Currently trying to wrap my head around the participant statement for my son’s NDIS planning meeting coming up this Thursday. The requirements are so vague and they say they’ll accept it in any form, so I’m considering presenting a diorama or interpretive dance. I’m hoping to get a meeting with an autism adviser before the meeting so I can understand what on earth they want to know.